Top 10 Web Design Flaws Impacting SmartPhones and Tablets

Web Design on 32% of sites has design flaws

Web design flaws were the focus of a recent Janco survey. There were 10 major design flaws that impacted web sites when they are viewed on the smaller displays of SmartPhones and Tablets.

Janco reviewed 1,045 major sites and found that 32% (335 out of 1,045) of them had at least one of these top 10 flaws.

Look and feel is not consistent across devices – Pages were designed for a desktop and have not been adapted to meet the requirements’ of SmartPhones and tablets

CSS style sheets lacking – Style and formatting information is contained within the body of the pages. For example the font sizes may be good for a desktop but without the proper use of css styles it is too small in smaller displays.

Images are not scalable – Images are of a fixed size, as the device changes the image do not in proportion to the page resulting in pages that are difficult to view on the smaller screens if SmartPhones

Pages have too much content and are too busy – Page content often is not focused and tries to cover too many “bases”

Pages take too long to load – Pages have not been optimized to improve load times

Text is too small – The text is too small and when the page is magnified on the smaller display the user has to scroll in order to view the page

Layouts do not adjust according to device the pages are viewed on – On multi-column pages, on smaller devices, the layout is not adjusted to show one column at at time.

Images do not have alternative text – If images do not load quickly no alternate text displays.

Adobe Flash is used and non function on Apple devices – Apple’s Safari does not support Flash so this content cannot be viewed on iPads and iPhones

Menuing systems are not conducive to variable size devices - Long horizontal menus do not display well on smaller screens and vertical menus in multi-column pages do not work well.

About Victor Janulaitis

M. Victor Janulaitis is the CEO of Janco Associates. He has taught at the USC Graduate School of Business, been a guest lecturer at the UCLA's Anderson School of Business, a Graduate School at Harvard University, and several other universities in various programs.